Red Emma’s

_Murder on the Hatchie _uncovers one of the earliest and most consequential crimes in America's long struggle for Black voting rights: the 1940 lynching of Elbert Williams in Brownsville, Tennessee. A founding member of the local NAACP, Williams was murdered for attempting to register Black voters, decades before the more famous murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers.

Through rigorous research and gripping narrative, retired trial attorney Jim Emison reconstructs the events surrounding Williams's lynching and the federal government's failure to prosecute his killers. Drawing on FBI files, Department of Justice correspondence, and eyewitness accounts, Emison reconstructs how white officials conspired to silence a community, implicating local law enforcement, federal agents, and even national NAACP leadership.

Emison repositions Brownsville as a pivotal site in civil rights history and exposes how voter suppression, racial terror, and government complicity shaped the American democracy we inherit today. With a foreword by Margaret A. Burnham, Murder on the Hatchie challenges liberal assumptions about justice and the embedded character of Jim Crow. For readers of Blood Done Sign My Name and By Hands Now Known, this is both a gripping true-crime investigation and a vital work of historical restoration.

After forty-three years as a Tennessee trial attorney, Jim Emison devoted his retirement to investigating the 1940 murder of NAACP leader Elbert Williams. Emison's work has been featured by the Associated Press, NPR, and Nashville Public Television, and led to a renewed Department of Justice review under the Emmett Till Act. Emison is the co-founder of Tennesseans for Historical Justice and a board member of the Tennessee Historical Society.

India Artis's passion for Black history began while studying under Dr. Vivian Gordon, the first Black woman to earn tenure at the University of Virginia. In 1988, she joined The Crisis, the NAACP's historic magazine founded by W.E.B. Du Bois, serving as Senior Advertising Representative before becoming Business Manager, where she worked closely with civil rights leaders Myrlie Evers-Williams, Julian Bond, and Roger Wilkins. Her mentor, with more than 70 years of service to the NAACP, Mildred Bond Roxborough, is the daughter of Ollie and Mattye Bond who established the Brownsville, TN NAACP branch with Elbert Williams. In 2021, Artis was appointed NAACP Archivist where she oversees the preservation of the Association's historic records and its partnership with the Library of Congress, home to the NAACP's more than five-million-item collection, ensuring the legacy of the civil rights movement continues to educate and inspire future generations.